My theories were way off.

Table-setting for the final two, I'll let it slide. Next one looks like it's gonna be crazy given the preview.

This episode was necessary, because I think we have now covered everything we needed to know pre-2012. We're still in a bit of a blur concerning Rust's activity between 2002 and 2012, but I think it'll unfold as we go forward with the story in 2012.

I think this episode shows something important about Marty's wife too. She was only a victim of Marty's wrongdoings before, but she's changed, and now she's surrendered to lies just as much as Marty and Rust have. I don't really see why she would lie to the cops about it though, so maybe there's more.

This is something I've observed too: the way I see the two characters has changed a lot since the beginning. Marty was the slower-witted, down to earth counterpart to Rust. But he's collapsing. The beginning would have us believe this was a good cop/bad cop partnership, but it's now looking like the both roles have switched.

i think Rusty is just quietly conducting his own investigation into the Yellow King outside of the law.  The Yellow King might actually be somebody high up the chain that he has to take down through unorthodox means.

I enjoyed that ep a good bit, altho I agree with the assessments that it's a "table setting" ep and Maggie's scene was weakly structured. I like the development of her character and the shifting that has happened to Rust and Marty, as Rob pointed out.

I mostly agree with your point, but you're tilting a little /mensrights. "BETER WIMIN CHARKTIRS" is an easy critique of, well, almost anything, and in a given case the eloquence and validity of that sentiment will vary from sad-accurate to eye-roll-click-bait.

I'll argue that, until last night, the agency of any of the show's female characters was handled only in the periphery. Like, consider a narrative-influence-Bechdel-Test. Marty's paramour will date, the proprietor of the bunny ranch will drop some agency knowledge, Audrey will sleep around. These actions color the story, but don't drop stage center and function par-level with the decisions of our "heroes" until Maggie acts in face of Marty's bullshit apparent.

The think pieces along these lines really are getting out of control. (I had to shut down my Google Alert.) There's definitely a fair bit of redundancy and point-missing going on. "Lazy" is the right word for many of these pieces.

What drives it, in part, is that articles about TD are timely. Most of these people are on short deadlines. They need to produce so many pieces per-week, and those pieces need to get clicks, and it's always going to be easier to tear into a show like TD by taking this tack than it is to grab a ladder and go after more higher-hanging fruit. Episode postmortems start getting posted minutes after the end credits roll. They literally don't have the time, nor the ability in some cases, to engage the show along the more non-ideological, aesthetic lines Ewing describes. Ideology is always easier because they know the "correct" answers and, at this point, you don't even have to watch the show very carefully to note its male-centrism. Even a cookie-cutter, poorly reasoned piece taking the show to task for sexism will get tons of retweets. The show is trending, and the websites know it. It's their bread and butter.

What's particularly irksome is that, in this case, I actually believe in the ideology. I believe that women on TV and film are too often depicted in these ways, that there aren't enough meaty roles for women, and I recognize that the show is profoundly male-centric (but I tend to disagree about why the show is that and what it means). The "depiction is not necessarily endorsement" idea is something many of these pieces will in the first paragraph claim to accept as true, but then the next 1100 words will make clear that the writer actually doesn't believe that. That's annoying. Especially given that TD does seem to be doing it on purpose (which is to say, for a purpose) as Doc suggests.